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http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/08/201183113418599933.html
Zizek and Gaddafi: Living in the old world
A prominent European philosopher who argues that the Arab Spring is over
simply can't fathom a new, hopeful world.
Hamid Dabashi Last Modified: 01 Sep 2011 12:32
Slavoj Zizek's failure to understand the true nature of the upheavals
across the Arab world, such as in Libya, above, can be ascribed to his
'postmodern existential angst' and lack of imagination [EPA]
Just a couple of days before the fall of Tripoli to Libyan rebels, Saidj
Mustapha, a prominent Algerian political scientist was asked his opinion
about the Arab Spring.
He responded by outlining a number of key factors that he thought had
contributed to the making of the dramatic transnational revolutions,
particularly the aging leadership and the young population, mixed with
the corruption of the ruling regimes, concluding that: “The young people
who launched this revolution do not come from the traditional political
institutions, such as political parties or military coup elites. This
makes us look forward to a phase of democratic transition from an
authoritarian regime to a pluralistic, democratic system.”
When he was asked to predict what would happen in Libya (this interview
was conducted in Algiers on August 19, 2011, just before the Libyan
rebels entered Tripoli), he gave a detailed answer,
scenario-by-scenario, analysing the possibilities of (1) civil war that
would split Libya like Sudan, (2) the triumph of the Transitional
National Council, and (3) the nightmare of Iraq or Somalia and civil
strife in which he feared that the al-Qaeda in Maghreb might be the
beneficiary. In a very short interview, but still in very precise terms,
Saidj Mustapha was meticulous, caring, optimistic, and above all
celebratory of the Arab Spring and the new horizons of open-ended
politics it had occasioned.
As the fate, or metahistorical force of events, would have it, exactly
on the same day, August 19, 2011, the London Review of Books published
an essay by the famous European philosopher Slavoj Zizek, frivolously
titled (as is his wont), “Shoplifters of the World Unite,” in which he
gave his take on the recent UK riots.
Zizek's worldless world
In this article, Zizek concurred with Alain Badiou, his French
counterpart, that “we live in a social space which is increasingly
experienced as ‘worldless’: in such a space, the only form protest can
take is meaningless violence”. Zizek continued to suggest that “the
riots should be situated in relation to another type of violence that
the liberal majority today perceives as a threat to our way of life:
terrorist attacks and suicide bombings”. But, he stipulated, “the
difference is that, in contrast to the riots in the UK or in Paris,
terrorist attacks are carried out in service of the absolute Meaning
provided by religion.”
So what we have here, as Zizek saw it, defined by shoplifters and
terrorists, is a “worldless” world (informed by Badiou and shoplifters)
and occupied by “absolute Meaning” (suggested by Hegel and Osama bin
Laden).
Zizek then turns his attention to the Arab Spring: “But weren’t the Arab
uprisings a collective act of resistance that avoided the false
alternative of self-destructive violence and religious fundamentalism?”
This should have given the European philosopher a sign of hope in what
appeared to be a worldless world filled with absolutist religious
meanings thrown like grenades by terrorist Hegelians. But it did not.
The European philosopher has lost all hope: “Unfortunately, the Egyptian
summer of 2011 will be remembered as marking the end of revolution, a
time when its emancipatory potential was suffocated.”
“The end of revolution?” So early? So early in the game and so utterly
has the European philosopher lost all hope. How did he come to that
conclusion? “Its gravediggers are the army and the Islamists. The
contours of the pact between the army (which is Mubarak’s army) and the
Islamists (who were marginalised in the early months of the upheaval but
are now gaining ground) are increasingly clear: the Islamists will
tolerate the army’s material privileges and in exchange will secure
ideological hegemony.”
To be sure, this has by now become a cliché concern among a certain
segment of Arab intellectuals too, but more as a defiant rallying cry
than a metaphysical fait accompli, the air in which Zizek was delivering
his ruling. There were other Arab activists and intellectuals who were
even more concerned about their revolution being derailed and kidnapped
by the perfectly business-suit-clad and clean shaven neoliberals, by the
IMF, by the World Bank, by the NATO bombings, by American
neoconservatives “helping Arabs transit to democracy”, while they put
“boots on the ground” and signed with them lucrative business deals.
Zizek: out of touch
But strange that the (evidently Marxist) European philosopher had no
concerns about those kinds of “suffocating” the revolution. On a
previous occasion I have suggested that the distinguished European
philosophers like Zizek who wish to say something about other parts of
the world need to diversify among their native informers. But alas,
Zizek seems not to have listened to my advice. “The losers,” he warns
Europeans, “will be the pro-Western liberals, too weak - in spite of the
CIA funding they are getting - to ‘promote democracy’, as well as the
true agents of the spring events, the emerging secular left that has
been trying to set up a network of civil society organisations, from
trade unions to feminists”.
All these key confusions of Zizek - his “secular left” in particular is
a giveaway - should warn him to start shopping around (with a proper
credit card of course, for shoplifting is nihilistic) for better native
informers. The ones he has now are no good. In a “worldless” world,
filled with Absolute meanings of militant Islamists stealing revolutions
like shoplifters, Zizek’s diagnosis is that “today’s left faces the
problem of ‘determinate negation’: what new order should replace the old
one after the uprising, when the sublime enthusiasm of the first moment
is over?"
In this “worldless” world we have, it seems, a lack of organisation; yes
indeed, party politics. Zizek mourns precisely where and what Saidj
Mustapha celebrates. Zizek dismisses not just the UK shoplifters, the
Muslim terrorists, and the Arab revolutions, but even the Spanish
indignados:
In this context, the manifesto of the Spanish indignados, issued after
their demonstrations in May, is revealing. The first thing that meets
the eye is the pointedly apolitical tone: 'Some of us consider ourselves
progressive, others conservative. Some of us are believers, some not.
Some of us have clearly defined ideologies, others are apolitical, but
we are all concerned and angry about the political, economic and social
outlook that we see around us: corruption among politicians,
businessmen, bankers, leaving us helpless, without a voice.'
They make their protest on behalf of the 'inalienable truths that we
should abide by in our society: the right to housing, employment,
culture, health, education, political participation, free personal
development and consumer rights for a healthy and happy life'. Rejecting
violence, they call for an ‘ethical revolution ... The indignados
dismiss the entire political class, right and left, as corrupt and
controlled by a lust for power ... And this is the fatal weakness of
recent protests: they express an authentic rage which is not able to
transform itself into a positive programme of sociopolitical change.
They express a spirit of revolt without revolution.
So no hope in Spain either, where people are revolting without having a
revolution. Is it not entirely unpredictable that the European
philosopher goes back to Greece, his fictive birthplace, for solace and
hope: “The situation in Greece looks more promising, probably owing to
the recent tradition of progressive self-organisation (which disappeared
in Spain after the fall of the Franco regime).”
But even good old Greece is not a happy scene for “the Absolute
Professor” (this was Søren Kierkegaard ‘s choice term for Zizek’s idol
Hegel), for “even in Greece, the protest movement displays the limits of
self-organisation: protesters sustain a space of egalitarian freedom
with no central authority to regulate it, a public space where all are
allotted the same amount of time to speak and so on”.
This to Zizek is anarchy, lacking in revolutionary discipline, the
necessary cadre of political party apparatchiks of the old Soviet sort.
“When the protesters started to debate what to do next, how to move
beyond mere protest, the majority consensus was that what was needed was
not a new party or a direct attempt to take state power, but a movement
whose aim is to exert pressure on political parties. This is clearly not
enough to impose a reorganisation of social life. To do that, one needs
a strong body able to reach quick decisions and to implement them with
all necessary harshness."
The abyss had opened and the postmodern professor has become positively
punctilious; yes, indeed, dare we say it: conservative. All it takes is
a riot in London (retail therapy on steroids), a terrorist attack in New
York, and a misinformed native informer of the Arab Spring in the
philosopher’s company to turn the world dark and worldless, filled with
Absolute fanaticism, and expose the postmodern existential angst unable
to read the signs of time.
Is the Arab Spring half-full or half-empty?
Whence the difference between these two perspectives: the Arab
intellectual morally invested and politically engaged, while his
European counterpart morally aloof and politically pessimistic? One has
everything to gain, a world to live; the other nothing to lose, having
lost his world to worldlessness. The Algerian political scientist
thrives on a visionary reading of a world that Zizek dismisses as
already worldless. Why is Saidj Mustapha not afraid of a conspiracy
between the Islamists and the generals? Why is Joseph Massad far more
afraid of American neoliberals and neoconservatives than of Islamists? A
world is unfolding right in front of Zizek’s eyes and he sees the world
worldless, the Egyptian revolution suffocated, the Arab Spring lost. How
and why is it that the Algerian intellectual celebrates precisely what
the European philosopher mourns: the absence of party politics, the rise
of a politics beyond clichés?
Zizek mourns worldlessness, and designates absolute Meaning as the cause
of terrorism. He does not see the world that is unfolding right before
him as a hopeful, purposeful, worldly, life-affirming world. This is
because, just like Gaddafi, Zizek is stuck in his old ways. He cannot
believe his eyes, he cannot believe what is happening to him: that his
world has ended, not the world; that he (embodying a European philosophy
at the losing end of its dead certainties) lives a worldless world, not
the world.
Zizek and Gaddafi are identical souls, sticking to the worlds they know,
militantly, the world they are losing - defiant rebels banging at the
Bab Aziziyeh compound of their habitat, a world that is either theirs or
it will not exits: “Après moi, le déluge.” Barely begun, Zizek
dismisses the Arab Spring and then mourns the loss of idealism among the
shoplifters.
It is in fact the European philosopher himself that is the gravedigger
of history, having nothing to see, nothing to say, nothing to celebrate,
because this history is not his history, is not History, for History has
always been His, and not anyone else’s. It is quite a moment in History
when the Hegelian cannot tell between signs of a disease (shoplifting
and terrorism) as the thesis and the sights of a cure (the Arab Spring)
as antithesis - giving it up to generals and Islamists. London riots and
terrorism of one brand or another are the symptoms of a disease, of
capitalism and its imperialist fighter jets running amok from the top to
the bottom.
Arab Spring is the renewed ground zero of history, the sight of a world
that is beginning to reveal itself, precisely at the moment when the
European philosopher sees the world “worldless” because it is not his
world - just like Colonel Gaddafi - a world in which he cannot imagine
himself, for he has been imagining the world for everyone else. The Arab
Spring is the opening horizons of a hope of emancipation, of a renewed
reading of world, of worlds. But Zizek does not see it because this is
not the world of his making, the visage and force of a world Hegel had
delegated to pre-History, non-History. Zizek has already recited the
obituary of the Arab Spring, while what appears as a worldless world to
the European philosopher is a world he cannot fathom, as it is being
inhabited by others he cannot not read.
Hamid Dabashi is Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and
Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York. He is the
author, most recently, of Shi’ism: A Religion of Protest (Harvard
University Press, 2011).
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